Play Hard

David Guetta brought together Akon and Ne-Yo for Play Hard, a high-energy electronic dance track released on March 15, 2013. It was the third single from the 2012 reissue of Guetta's album Nothing but the Beat, originally released in 2011. This was Guetta and Akon's third collaboration after Sexy Bitch (2009) and Crank It Up (2011), while Ne-Yo joined them for the first time. The song's recognizable synthesizer riff samples Alice Deejay's 1998 hit Better Off Alone, earning writing credits for Sebastiaan Molijn and Eelke Kalberg.

The track was co-written by Guetta, Akon, Ne-Yo, Frédéric Riesterer, and Giorgio Tuinfort, and produced by Guetta, Riesterer, and Tuinfort. Commercially, it reached number six on the UK Singles Chart, becoming Guetta's fourteenth top-ten hit there as a lead artist. It also cracked the top ten in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Scotland, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland. In Australia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and New Zealand, it landed in the top twenty.

Critical reception was mixed. Some praised its infectious beat and catchy chorus, calling it a festival anthem. Others found it formulaic and overly reliant on the sampled riff. The song did not receive major individual awards but contributed to the commercial success of Nothing but the Beat. It became a club staple and is often cited as a quintessential example of the early 2010s EDM boom.[edit]